Art in Review; John Marin

By MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Published: October 27, 2006

John Marin (1870-1953), a painter who exhibited regularly at Gallery 291, Alfred Stieglitz's bastion of the nascent American avant-garde, is often credited with influencing the Abstract Expressionists. His treatment of paint, handling oils almost like watercolors, forays into abstraction and evocative stretches of bare canvas caught the eye of younger painters. As the title of this intimate exhibition suggests, however, Marin always teetered on ''The Edge of Abstraction.''

Instead, he took lessons from all the great European ''isms.'' The Cubist breakdown of form and Futurism's obsession with movement and speed are evident in breathless, sketchy landscapes and seascapes from both early and late moments in his career. Fauvism's bright, arbitrary coloring and the slashing brushwork of Expressionism are used to portray urban buildings, trees and ships' masts.

The show's catalog argues that Marin didn't merely vacillate between abstraction and representation, but often employed both simultaneously, a claim supported by two of his best-known tendencies. The first is his use of watercolor, a medium that allows for both the careful description of objects and the ability to blur them into hazy washes. The second is Marin's favorite subject, the seascape, which painters from Turner to Monet embraced for its atmospheric effects: sunlight, reflections, darkness, rain and fog. Like his predecessors, Marin relished a subject that could be painted to look at the same time recognizable and indistinct.

Two roiling, brushy watercolors on paper, ''The Sea'' (1923) and ''Approaching Fog'' (1952), remind us of Marin's maritime fixation. But his cityscapes can be equally illuminating. ''New York Fantasy'' (around 1912), a shimmering watercolor with a strip of skyline hovering between horizontal registers, demonstrates how, in the course of a single painting, Marin incorporated both abstraction and representation. It also points ahead three decades to Mark Rothko. MARTHA SCHWENDENER